State of the art technology has been used to reproduce King Richard III’s voice and it has given him a Yorkshire accent.
The medieval kings head has gone on display at York Theatre Royal where a digital avatar is able to communicate with excited guests from beyond the grave.
Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 at the age of 32 just two years after assuming the throne.
His defeat to Henry Tudor signalled the start of the Tudor dynasty, carving a path for Henry VIII and Elizabeth I to ultimately change Britain forever.
The former king’s body was discovered underneath a car park in Leicester in 2012 by historian Philippa Langley who said of the recreation: “We’ve got leading experts in their fields who have been working on this for 10 years and so everything has been meticulously researched, meticulously evidenced, so you are seeing the most accurate portrayal of Richard III.”
The avatar was created by Face Lab, a team based at John Moores University in Liverpool who used the unearthed skeleton of Richard III with the help of a craniofacial expert to create a realistic recreating.
The project took contributions from speech and language therapists, dentists, archaeologists and forensic psychologists to create the final product currently on display.
Despite being born in Northampton, the king belonged to the House of York and spent the majority of his life in Yorkshire.
Vocal coach Yvonne Morley-Chisholm spent 10 years researching how the monarch would have sounded and was instrumental in choosing the actor who would eventually voice the final Plantagenet king.
Speaking to Sky News, she said that she imagined people would be shocked by the accent when compared to monarchs of the modern era.
Throughout history however, British monarchs have had a range of accents, with James I hailing from Scotland, George I from Germany and William III from the Netherlands.
The vocal coach examined the king’s surviving letters so that “as you pronounced a word that’s how you would write it”.
Visitors at the unveiling told Sky News that they were delighted in the king’s voice being recreated, with one commenting that: “Northerners are known to be happy, positive, all those lovely qualities.”
